Recent empirical work indicates that reduced autobiographical memory specificity can act as an avoidant processing style. By truncating the memory search before specific elements of traumatic memories are accessed, one can ward off the affective impact of negative reminiscences. This avoidant processing style can be viewed as an instance of what Erdelyi describes as the “subtractive” class of repressive processes.

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

The term ‘heat’ originates from the Old English word hǣtu, a word of Germanic origin; related to the Dutch ‘hitte’ and German ‘Hitze’. Today, we distinguish three different meanings of the word ‘heat’. First, ‘heat’ is understood in colloquial English as ‘hotness’. There are, in addition, two scientific meanings of ‘heat’. ‘Heat’ can have the meaning of the portion of energy that changes with a change of temperature. And finally, ‘heat’ can have the meaning of the transfer of thermal energy (...) from a hotter to a colder system or body. By contrast, for the Ancients and Scholastics, ‘heat’ was a manifest, real quality of bodies and there was an ontological distinction between biological or innate heat (which was regarded as an innate principle of life for warm-blooded animals) and the physical manifest heat of external objects, which is potentially harmful. During the late Renaissance period, however, both views changed fundamentally and evolved - via the application of physical and mechanical analogies - into the foundations for today’s unified mechanistic theory of heat. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks (...) at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. If we don't know what the words 'democracy' and 'democratic' mean, then we don't know what democracy is. This book defends a radical view: these words mean nothing and should be abandoned. The argument for Abolitionism is simple: those terms are defective (...) and we can easily do better, so let's get rid of them. According to the abolitionist, the switch to alternative devices would be a significant communicative, cognitive, and political advance. The first part of the book presents a general theory of abandonment: the conditions under which language should be abandoned. The rest of the book applies this general theory to the case of 'democracy' and 'democratic'. Cappelen shows that 'democracy' and 'democratic' are semantically, pragmatically, and communicatively defective. Abolitionism is not all gloom and doom. It also contains a message of good cheer: we have easy access to conceptual devices that are more effective than 'democracy'. We can do better. These alternative linguistic devices will enable us to ask better questions, provide genuinely fruitful answers, and have more rational discussions. Moreover, those questions and answers better articulate the communicative and cognitive aims of those who use empty terms like 'democracy' and 'democratic'. (shrink)

I propose a theory aimed at advancing scholarly research in social entrepreneurship. By highlighting the key trade-off between value creation and value capture and explaining when situations of simultaneous market and government failure may arise, I suggest that social entrepreneurship is the pursuit of sustainable solutions to neglected problems with positive externalities. I further discuss the situations in which problems with externalities are likely to be neglected and derive the central goal and logic of action of social entrepreneurs, in contrast (...) to commercial entrepreneurs. Overall, this article provides a conceptual framework that allows understanding the growing phenomena of social entrepreneurship and its role in the functioning of modern society. (shrink)

This volume provides the reader with the substantial evidence, presented here for the first time in a chronological manner, of the essential place that Dionysus occupied in Greek and Roman political thought. The eleven chapters that make up the volume are authored by an interdisciplinary team of scholars (including four top specialists in the field, Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, Richard Seaford, Richard Stoneman and Jean-Marie Pailler) and cover the period from archaic Greece to the late Roman empire. The reader can therefore observe (...) how the political ideas and motifs rooted in Greek classical thought were continued, adapted, and developed in successive periods of history. The contributors reconstruct the political significance of Dionysus by examining different kinds of evidence: historiography, poetry, coins, epigraphy, art, and philosophy. They discuss the place of the god in the politics of Greek city-states, explore the long tradition of imitating Dionysus that ancient leaders, from Alexander the Great to the Roman emperors, manifested in various ways, as well as demonstrate how the political role of Dionysus was reflected in Orphism and Neoplatonist philosophy. Dionysus and Politics provides an excellent introduction to a fundamental feature of ancient political thought which until now has been largely neglected by mainstream academia. The book will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars interested in ancient politics and religion. (shrink)

The article proposes to analyse whether the current configuration of national migration legislation from Arendt's perspective on the universalization of human rights and Agamben's reflections on bare life and the state of exception demonstrates its capacity to protect the human rights of people undergoing forced migration. To this end, a literature review of a bibliographical nature was used, using the historical procedure method. In order to interpret the effectiveness of the current configuration of the human rights of this vulnerable group, (...) an analysis of international and national legislation on migration was carried out, focusing mainly on the case of the New Brazilian Migration Law. To this end, a theoretical discussion was built to understand how human rights are framed considering the situation of migration and statelessness in the face of an increasingly prevalent state of exception. It was noted that the constitutive fragility of forced migrants is a perennial situation, aggravated by the political inaction of nation states. It has also been noted that there is a need for states and international organizations to adopt new practices to promote the human dignity of forced migrants. (shrink)

L’objectif de cette introduction est double : elle présente les articles rassembles dans ce volume et offre une synthèse des développements récents de l’épistemologie des modalités.The role of this introduction is twofold: it presents the papers collected in this volume and offers a synthesis of recent developments of the epistemology of modality.

Proliferating literature claims that academia is in a critical condition, generating armies of anxious, neurotic and time-hungry individuals which are governed by the speed imperatives integral to a modernist and capitalist rationality. This book puts the temporal ordering of academic life under the microscope, and showcases the means of yielding a better understanding of how time and temporality act both as instruments of power and vulnerability within the academic space. This book brings together more than three dozen scholars who collectively (...) craft a much-needed nuanced sociologically-driven perspective of temporalities in academia. Delving into contemporary processes which are quintessentially temporal in their character, such as the increasing precariousness of jobs among junior scholars, the prevalence of grant funding, the role of evaluation systems, and the political economy of higher education, the authors offer a forensic analysis of the complex nature of academic temporalities as experienced, understood, controlled, managed and contested in various academic and research contexts. (shrink)

The article focuses on the history of the conflict between analytic and continental tradition, which dominated the philosophy of the 20th century. Although both traditions originated from the same intellectual environment and were heavily influenced by Neo-Kantianism, their mutual lack of understanding progressed over time and, on several occasions, the situation grew into open hostility. The article describes the ten most serious conflicts: Russell vs. Bergson, Schlick vs. Husserl, Carnap vs. Heidegger, Ryle vs. Heidegger, Popper's critique of pseudoscience, conference in (...) Royaumont, Searle vs. Derrida, the revelation of Heidegger's Nazi past, Derrida's Honorary Doctorate from Cambridge, and Sokal's scam. At the beginning of the 21st century it turns out that the conflict between analytic and continental philosophy has been exhausted. What is more substantial is the dispute over the philosophical methodology, which is reflected in the division into naturalistic and anti-naturalistic thinkers. (shrink)

I suggest here ecologies of the nascent state, posing the following general questions: what is this state and what is it to live, to fabricate modes of life, in its immanence? I believe populating this state is, by right, ‘ecological’, even if what I offer here is only a sketch or glimpse, playful as it is, of the possibility of such modes of life, of dwelling. As I develop it here, the nascent is in flight of being. It is populated (...) by lesser, minoritarian existences. If it is ‘ecological’, it is because these existences, or modes of becoming, are themselves, in their own right, ‘ecologies’, that is, modes of dwelling, of life, on the ‘other side of existence’, as Antonin Artaud put it once, in exile from Being. The power to return eternally to the nascent state is the power to live, to dwell, in the absolute forgetfulness of Being, in the interstice where philosophy supposedly ends, but where it nevertheless begins again, in oblivion itself, where being is never already the verticality of Being, its difference with beings, but always nascent, in the beginning, eternally so. (shrink)

Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned goodness. (...) This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy. (shrink)

We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional approach against (...) more contentious social constructivist approaches to science and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This book consists of eleven new essays that provide new insights into classical and contemporary issues surrounding free will and human agency. They investigate topics such as the nature of practical knowledge and its role in intentional action; mental content and explanations of action; recent arguments for libertarianism; the situationist challenge to free will; freedom and a theory of narrative configuration; the moral responsibility of the psychopath; and free will and the indeterminism of quantum mechanics. Also tackling some historical precursors (...) of contemporary debates, taken together these essays demonstrate the need for an approach that recognizes the multifaceted nature of free will. This book provides essential reading for anyone interested in the current scholarship on free will. (shrink)

The author discusses Aristotle’s notion of deliberation and shows that it differs considerably from the model of deliberation as is common in contemporary discussions of free will and moral responsibility. As opposed to the contemporary model, Aristotle’s account does not require that the deliberator has any belief (or lack thereof) concerning the availability of possible courses of action. However, the action chosen by deliberation, before it is performed, is still contingent––i.e. such that it can both be and not be done––and (...) up to us. Moreover, the action’s being up to us can be seen as grounded in our having rational capacities that are necessarily two-sided. This might suggest that the agent can do otherwise than she has decided by deliberation. The author argues that this is not the case: after deliberation, or after forming the relevant desire, the agent can actualize only one arm of her two-sided capacity, and hence, she cannot act differently than as decided by deliberation. If it makes sense to say that she can act differently, it is only because there may occur, in the interval between deliberation and action, some other desire which takes over a role of the decisive factor. (shrink)

Článek představuje teorii původu lidské morálky od Franse de Waala a zhodnocuje přínos filozofických komentářů od Christine M. Korsgaardové a Mary Midgleyové z hlediska oboru evoluční etiky. Základní struktura de Waalova přístupu je v souladu se sentimentalistickou teorií morálky, která určuje soucítění jako bazální morální cit. V interpretaci vlivné neodarwinistické genocentrické školy dále hraje zásadní roli altruismus. Stoupenci tohoto směru nicméně obhajují rozdělení krutého světa přírody a etického světa lidské kultury; distinkce byla Fransem de Waalem nazvána „teorií pozlátka“, neboť vyvolává (...) obraz tenké vrstvy morálky nanesené na sobecké jádro lidské biologické přirozenosti. C. M. Korsgaardová využívá kantovskou etiku, aby ukázala, že zvířata nemohou být počítána za morální, neboť postrádají schopnost normativní autonomie. M. Midgleyová oponuje jak neodarwinistickému, tak kantovskému rozvrhu etiky a ukazuje, že soucítění patří k přirozenosti společensky žijících druhů a že reflektivní uvažování se vztahuje pouze k nejvyššímu patru evoluce morálky. Pozice M. Midgleyové je pro evoluční zkoumání morálky přínosnější než postup C. M. Korsgaardové. This article introduces Frans de Waal’s theory of the origins of human morality and evaluates the merits of the philosophical commentaries of Christine M. Korsgaard and Mary Midgley, and their application to the discipline of evolutionary ethics. The fundamental structure of de Wall’s approach is congruent with the sentimentalist theory of morality which determines sympathy as the most vital moral sentiment. A crucial role is also assigned to altruism in the view of morality in the influential genocentric neo-Darwinian school. However, proponents of this school advocate the separation of the cruel world of nature and the ethical world of humane culture; this is dubbed “Veneer Theory” by F. de Waal, since it invokes an image of a thin layer of morality applied to a selfish core of biological human nature. C. M. Korsgaard applies Kantian ethics to argue that animals cannot count as moral because they are not capable of normative self-government. M. Midgley opposes both neo-Darwinism and the Kantian tradition in ethics in arguing that sympathy is a part of any social species’ nature, and that reflective reasoning refers only to the highest peak of moral evolution. It is argued that the position of M. Midgley is ultimately a more fruitful approach to the evolutionary examination of ethics than that proposed by C. M. Korsgaard. (shrink)

This paper analyses Bohr’s complementarity framework and applies it to biosemiotic studies by illustrating its application to three existing models of living systems: mechanistic biology, Barbieri’s version of biosemiotics in terms of his code biology and Markoš’s phenomenological version of hermeneutic biosemiotics. The contribution summarizes both Bohr’s philosophy of science crowned by his idea of complementarity and his conception of the phenomenon of the living. Bohr’s approach to the biological questions evolved – among other things – from the consequences of (...) an epistemological lesson of quantum theory and in light of complementarity of observer as a priori living creature and ex post scientific explanation of the living. In a manifestation of the phenomenon of the living, each model of living system and its description makes accessible – from its own presuppositions, contexts and concepts – some features which are not accessible from the others. Nevertheless, for a general understanding of that phenomenon, incompatible sophisticated approaches are equally necessary. Bohr’s epistemology of complementarity turns out to be a heuristic and methodical framework for testing the extent to which biosemiotics can become one of the special sciences or its potential as a cross-disciplinary branch of study. (shrink)

In our book The Inessential Indexical we argue that the various theses of essential indexicality all fail. Indexicals are not essential, we conclude. One essentiality thesis we target in the third chapter is the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action. Our strategy is to give examples of what we call impersonal action rationalizations , which explain actions without citing indexical attitudes. To defeat the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action, it suffices that there could be even (...) one successful impersonal action rationalization. In what follows we bolster our case against an essential connection between action and the de se (or indexicality), first by developing a range of new action models and secondly by responding to challenges from Dilip Ninan, Stephan Torre, and José Luis Bermúdez . (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Nietzsche's Socio‐Physiology and the Question of Sovereignty Nietzsche versus Liberalism on Freedom and Resistance Freedom and Resistance in Nietzsche's Later Thought On the Necessity of Conflict for Freedom: Nietzsche's Critique of the Subject.

Contemporary society needs the recognition of a moral middle ground, where human behavior can be evaluated as permissible, understandable, or even valuable. As a counterforce to polarization and divisive politics, an identity model is proposed in which individual and group identities are transcended by a human and ecological identity.